The actress also opened up about her struggles with parenting when talking to her mom, Blythe Danner.
Gwyneth Paltrow isn’t afraid to discuss the harder parts of her life.
In her Goop Podcast, the lifestyle founder had a candid conversation with her actress mom, Blythe Danner. Over the course of the hour-long chat, Paltrow opened up about a series of topics, speaking the most passionately about motherhood.
“When I had Apple, my experience with myself was completely transformed,” Paltrow, 45, said of the birth of her 13-year-old daughter. “I was so in love with her, I still am.”
The Oscar winner noted that her experience giving birth to her 12-year-old son, Moses, wasn’t quite as blissful.
“I had terrible post-natal depression, which I think was really shocking to me because I never thought that I would be a person who got post-natal depression,” she explained. “I was so euphoric when Apple was born, and I assumed it would happen with Mosey and it took a while. I went to a dark place.”
Paltrow has been candid about her struggles in the past, telling ET in 2015, “It's a very debilitating thing, and I think there's so much shame around it and there shouldn't be. It's something that happens, it's something that befalls many women after they have a baby, and for me, it ended up being a wonderful opportunity to explore some underlying issues that I think the depression kind of brought out."
Though she’s been able to move past her depression, Paltrow added that parenting has provided its own unique set of challenges for her.
“Mosey and I are so similar in a lot of ways, and we have the same bad qualities, so sometimes I find it really triggering with him,” she said on the podcast. “And I always have to think, ‘OK, try to put a pause in between what you’re feeling and what you’re going to do or say next.’”
When her mom said she felt that kids were born the way they were going to be, with parenting playing a very small role in the matter, Paltrow noted, “My philosophy with my kids has been – I agree with you in that I think they come in with who they are – but then I think you can f**k it up. It’s really an art to be a parent and to try to parent consciously as opposed to out of instinct.”
Danner, 75, couldn’t stop gushing about her daughter, revealing that she wasn’t quite the prim and proper lady she’d been expecting.
“I think you came into the world with a very strong self-image and I couldn’t harm that. I may have tried. I may have tried to sway you to be more conforming to what I thought was a proper young girl and you were a rebel from the beginning, but thank god!” she said. “When I think of your extraordinary talent as a little girl, you knew my speeches before I did at two.”
The Will & Grace star revealed she still struggles thinking about how she raised Paltrow and her brother, Jake, with her late husband, Bruce Paltrow.
“You had a strength and you knew who you were. I should have been wise enough,” Danner told Paltrow. “That still bothers me, that I didn’t have the wisdom, which I think your dad did, to observe, to know that you were this creature, unlike anything I knew.”
For more from Paltrow, watch the clip below!
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